10 tips for creating a great inbound marketing strategy in 2019

According to Seth Godin, author, and former business executive, in 2019 “Content Marketing is all the Marketing that’s left.” The best way you can spread your brand awareness online is by creating your own online content, but it doesn’t stop there. You have to consider who you create it for, what you post, where you post it, how often you post it, and how you’re going to expand this into a full strategy for business expansion. Here are a few tips for how you can make inbound marketing work for you.

Understand the customer

Give yourself clear, achievable objectives for each piece of content

Track performance and update and adapt it where necessary

Create varied, targeted content to create leads

Invest in video content

Think SEO whenever you produce or update content

Create an editorial calendar

Keep an eye on the competition

Think about how to expand your strategy

Define your subject and plan how to promote your content

What Meero can do for you

1. Understand the customer

70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales

Before you even start the most basic of marketing campaigns, you need to know who you’re trying to sell to. Whether you need to do audience research, or just optimize your online presence, you want to know your target clients inside out. Their age, the amount they know about your work, their interests, where they live—all this information is important. You can’t just guess what they’re like, because you probably won’t be right! A real consideration of where and who you’re trying to advertise to is fundamental when it comes to inbound marketing.

A content marketing strategy is based around engaging the viewer online at every stage of the buyer’s journey—attracting visitors, enticing visitors to purchase, and ensuring that customers stay and maintain brand loyalty. After all, 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before a buyer even reaches out to sales, which means you’ve got a lot of work to do before they get there.

You want to direct them through 4 main stages, or the AIDA strategy:

Attract their Attention

Develop their Interest

Make them Desire your products

Call them to Action

That means you want content at the very beginning just spreading awareness about your work, then content showing why your work should be considered, then turning this into conversion by getting them to buy your products.

Take Spotify, for example. They have a large campaign of paid advertising with professional artists online, attracting people’s attention. Once they’re there, users get to use a limited version of the service for free developing interest—with commercials between songs talking about how the paid service works making them desire the service. That’s when they can make a sale.

One of the first things you want to do when you set about drawing up a real inbound marketing strategy is to figure out what you want to do with your content. To do that, you really need to bear in mind SMART objectives: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-restrained.

A lot of businesses set out goals for themselves, but out of that 83 % completely fail and 17% only partly achieve their goals. That’s why you need aims to be reasonable, and strategic for your business, not based on arbitrary targets.

These will make sure you keep your general plan grounded in results not ideals, making it far more effective. Some basic objectives can be:

Improve your brand awareness

Inform your targets

Turns prospects into leads and then into clients

Engage with online influencers

Keep clients interested with the content

Provide additional products at higher levels.

Generate new leads

Demonstrate your expertise

Defining your objectives is an important step in choosing the marketing strategies to put in place.

3. Track performance and update and adapt it where necessary

This means you need to make sure your site is performing well online to really attract any attention - not focus on paying for online traffic. The best way to do this is to just have a full audit of your online work. This means you go through all existing content and campaigns, find what isn’t working as well and what’s underperforming, and correct it to make it more effective than before. We recommend you do it a little bit like this:

Write up an inventory of your existing content.

Organize everything you have by different criteria: subject, length, tone, relevance, publication date and objective.

Follow them with indicators like click-through rate, conversion rate and the number of shares on social networks. You could also look at stuff like where your work turns up in search results and the rebound rate.

Examine the data to find out what works and what needs to be looked over.

While you’re at it, why not try A/B testing. This is a system that allows you to test two different versions of a piece of content and see which performs best for click-through rates, returns and conversions, etc. For example, you can use A/B testing to try out 2 different subject titles for an email by seeing which has the highest opening and click-through rate, or see which texts or colors work best for grabbing attention. Then you can use the one that performs best.

4. Create varied, targeted content to generate leads

Video could take up 82% of global internet traffic by 2021

To really have a developed inbound marketing strategy, you need developed content. This has to be material that really grabs the attention of the viewer and turns people browsing the internet into customers. You should aim to use media like:

Video to introduce your products and content or present an entire article. According to several studies videos could take up 82% of global internet traffic by 2021, so you want to get on this while you’re ahead.

Infographics. This kind of content is easy to read, and easy to get viral. They allow you to put key statistics at the front of your content marketing strategy, showing potential clients exactly the effect your work is having. There are several online tools like Biteable or Be Funky which are ideal for making this kind of content with standard templates to make this an even easier task.

White papers put the expertise of your company at the forefront of your brand image by showing as much information about you as possible. Casual viewers can see specific details on performances and you can grow trust in future professional partners. Also, using a white paper like this allows you to develop lead generation: that is, when you get people to download your paper by providing an email address or phone number, etc., you will easily be able to contact them later and interest them in your offers and solutions.

Targeted landing pages direct people viewing your site to the precise services they need and can be optimized with visual content.

Interactive elements like graphs, slideshows, galleries, etc.

Changing the forms of content you use for your marketing strategy allows you to target different audiences: videos are designed for a more casual, millennial demographic, whereas white papers are best for attracting corporate attention, for example.

At the same time, changing up your content like this allows you to share your work on far more platforms like YouTube for videos, Visual.ly for infographics, and Instagram or Pinterest for photos.

Also, just in case you missed this, you have to have personalization these days. Whether it’s a message including your first name like on Netflix recommending you new content (films), or Amazon’s home page recommending you products related to you personally, personalized content is all the rage.

It's more viral, dynamic and easy to remember than most other formats, and lets you make your messages online more easily understandable with a greater impact on your targets. But videos aren't just a good way of speaking awareness of your business - they also have a serious impact on your conversion rates. The average conversion rate for a site with videos is 4.8% compared to just 2.9% for those without. (Aberdeen Group).

Also, because it's so fast and effective, video marketing on social networks guarantees a high Return on Investment. 73% of B2B enterprises say that video has improved the ROI of their web marketing strategies.

6. Think SEO whenever you produce or update content

SEO has a 14.6% conversion rate, and is 61% less expensive than other strategies.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and content marketing are intimately linked. Admins that make sure that their website is optimized for search engine algorithms get the best position in search results, meaning more and more people will see your material.

Essentially, an important aspect of content marketing is making sure you use the right keywords. If you want to appear up there in the top results, you have to use a qualitative approach and use relevant text. Only 50% of all searches are 4 words or longer, so they have to be precise. For the past few years, the trend has been towards “long-tail keywords.” That is, more and more searchers use 3 or 4 very specific words in their searches, like “cheap black child jumper.”

Website content has to be sufficiently long and enjoyable to read. Giving yourself a minimum number of keywords to use in each post is a good idea for working on online referencing, but they have to be put in the text carefully and only where relevant. High-quality content is an essential foundation for natural references. If you put content in the right places online, it will get read more often and be far more visible. These are the kinds of things search engines take into account and guarantee online success if mastered.

You also should be thinking about the new voice search function of most search engines these days. In 2018 it was estimated 50% of Google searches were done from mobile, and of those, a good 20% were voice searches. From an SEO point of view, this means you need your key phrases and words to take on a more natural tone of voice. Given that a search done by a vocal command is more conversational than a written one, it's important to find ways to adapt to this.

According to an article from Forbes, SEO has a 14.6% conversion rate and is 61% less expensive than other strategies. This is an essential weapon in your content arsenal.

7. Create an editorial calendar to have a clear view of what content is going to be published

53% of the most effective content marketers use editorial calendars

One important tool to help coordinate your whole content marketing strategy is having an editorial calendar. This allows you to have your global marketing vision at your fingertips and maintain a regular rhythm for releasing content.

The other advantages to this kind of calendar are giving your teams a short-term strategic plan and a way of seeing your overall long-term objective. It can be ordered along these lines:

The article publication date

The submission date for the editor

The title (and type of content)

The category or theme

Important keywords to be referenced

The platform the content will be published on

The buyer's journey

Content annexes (images, documents to upload, etc.)

You should also bear in mindhow regularly you’re posting you can work out the most effective schedule for your production and content, and what types of content you're making: if you’re making videos as well as infographics and photos, then your calendar needs to distinguish between the two. Organize the calendar with regard to who will be using it, and take into account the different stages of the process (review or approval of content, formatting, etc.) As for the platform you want to use to make the editorial calendar, paid tools like CoSchedule or free platforms like Trello or Google Sheets work very well.

8. Keep an eye on the competition

Another thing you have to keep in mind is what your competitors are up to. You can do this by following their social media and networks, or using SEO tracking programs This means also looking at what’s going on in different sectors so you can follow:

What formats the competition is using for their content

What channels the competition is using for its communication

What kind of content strategy they’re using

This allows you to get a lot of relevant information about the market you’re working in and identify niches you can capitalize on. When you use up-to-date themes and innovative formats and invest in a specific area no one else is, you can stand out from the competition.

Once you’ve done that, you can look into the different results of the old competition, and infer from that what areas will remain relevant in the long term.

9. Think about how you can expand your strategy

To really expand your inbound marketing strategy, you have to redefine the boundaries of what your company expects. There are several ways of doing this:

Guest blogging: that is when you post your ideas and commerce on different blogs or other platforms. This can either be paid content or through a mutual agreement of exchanging articles with another company. This kind of content is vital because it puts you directly into different spheres of influence where you can work off an existing audience. Forbes BrandVoice provides a service like this of paid articles:

Contact influencers. If they really like what you’re doing, they’re going to talk about you to their followers completely free and put your name out in a wide audience. This is particularly effective if your strategy aims to target millennials. As well as that, put them at the heart of your content by using interviews or customer testimonies (in blog posts or videos), and they give your work much more credibility.

Write up a press dossier for journalists that could be interested in you. Appearing in a magazine or an online journal will immediately bring you a massive gain in visibility.

Make use of link building. The is essential leveraging to give more volume to your natural referencing and improve the position of your pages in search engine results. Contact other content marketers to ask them about a mutual backlinking or putting a hyperlink on either of your sites linking any of their followers back to the other.

Chatbots are also a new type of content that very rapidly generates traction. They rely on AI technology and can reply to queries or questions asked by visitors to your site really quickly. In 2018 69% of users questioned preferred chatbots to a conversation with a person in business because of their speed.

Whichever of these you choose, don’t forget to always redirect back to your own website by having a CTA (Call to Action) on the page. A viewer of your content will see the CTA banner or a ‘find out more’ button for example, and click it to be taken to your services directly. These can be used on blog websites, and social networks where a CTA can be absolutely vital. In fact, according to the FEVAD websites, 45% of internet users use social networks to find new retailers or new products, and 24% use them to purchase goods online thanks to a suggested link, like a CTA.

10. Define your subject and plan how to promote your content

Even if you spend hours and hours working on your content and think you’ve really perfected it, if you don’t make any effort to target and promote it, all this work has been for nothing.

You have to promote your content, put it on different forums, advertise it, and then get it to do its job.

Ways of distributing your ideas and material online include (but are not limited to):

Influencer marketing: reach out to bloggers or renowned influencers, and other influential people online that could reshare your work.

Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, etc.

Paid advertising: you can pay for some adverts on social networks that appear in people’s newsfeed (Facebook Ads and Twitters Ads), small banners on sites, and ads on search results thanks to services like Google AdWords or Bing Ads. Change up the methods and tones of your work to match your different target audiences - stay relevant! Having a nice ad is good, knowing who it's meant to be addressing is even better!

On the other hand, you mustn't repeat yourself and fill certain spaces with too much of your content all once. The key is a thought-out, strategic choosing of when and where you need to post to get your target audience.

Meero takes care of your visual content needs

As you know, our online habits and the way we do marketing are constantly changing. SEO, social media, the way people consume content or look for information online - these things can all have an enormous impact on how we do business. You have to know how to adapt to the behaviors of your consumers.

By 2021, video could take up 82% of all internet traffic. That means your content strategy has to have some kind of focus on visuals. High-quality photos and striking videos can totally change the amount of traffic and interest on your page. 51% of marketing professionals from all around the world say that content has the highest ROI of any form of content.

Meero takes care of all your business’ visual needs with our innovative new work processes and use of cutting-edge AI technology. We’re a startup specializing in visual content production including photos, videos, 360 VR and aerial drone footage. From the planning of your photoshoot right down to your photos being delivered back fully edited, Meero has a simple, inexpensive service for corporate needs. You get your content back 24 hours later, which will go on to boost your online visibility in record time.

Being in mind that 40 times shared on social networks than any other type of content, don’t wait while your competition makes gains with its visual content - let the world leader in professional photography take care of your ROI.